Quotes About Solitude

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”

— Hermann Hesse

“Today, Aaron decided, he would begin to grieve in earnest. He would walk the lonely beach, mocked by gulls, uncaring, his every step a stately rebuke to the malign forces that had blighted his fate. His was the tragedy of a man who couldn't have his own way, and he intended to make known his anguish in the solemn solitude that only a stretch of sand, a suspiring sea, and a beetling cliff could provide.”

— Joseph Caldwell

“The bar ... is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable - and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a client that doesn't like to talk.”

— Luis Buñuel

“No, solitude did not trouble her. She could spend long minutes gazing out the window, hours listening to the BBC on the public radio station. She relished the very texture of her privacy, its depth of space and freedom, much of an entire day hers alone.”

— Daphne Kalotay

“When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to teach them to think.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Olidays far apart from each other, going short of things, hours of cold and solitude? Fears? Does money cut distances short, bring people together?”

— Grégoire Delacourt

“Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.”

— Georges Bataille

“I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.”

— Eugène Ionesco

“Consider A Move
The steady time of being unknown,
in solitude, without friends,
is not a steadiness that sustains.
I hear your voice waver on the phone:
Haven't talked to anyone for days.
I drive around. I sit in parking lots.
The voice zeroes through my ear, and waits.
What should I say? There are ways
to meet people you will want to love?
I know of none. You come out stronger
having gone through this? I no longer
believe that, if I once did. Consider a move,
a change, a job, a new place to live,
someplace you'd like to be. That's not it,
you say. Now time turns back. We almost touch.
Then what is? I ask. What is?”

— Michael Ryan

“The rhythm of solitude, once so intimidating, began to feel comfortable. Aloneness, I was learning, does not have to equal loneliness.”

— John Grogan

“I am not sure what lonliness is," she said. "If it is not literally being solitary, is it the fear of solitude, of being alone with oneself? I feel no such fear. I like being alone."
"What do you fear then?" he asked her.
She glanced briefly at him and smiled, a fragile expression that spoke for itself even before she found words.
"Never finding myself again ...”

— Mary Balogh

“The black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.”

— Darnell Lamont Walker

“A person can also find solitude with others, though it is more difficult”

— Tove Jansson

“Be silent in that solitude Which is not loneliness - for then The spirits of the dead who stood In life before thee are again In death around thee - and their will Shall then overshadow thee: be still.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

“But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude.”

— Aphra Behn

“Solitude is obviously dangerous for people with active brains. We need men around us who have ideas and like talking. Leave us alone for any length of time, and we start filling the void with supernatural creatures.”

— Guy De Maupassant

“Running is many things to me: survival, calmness, euphoria, solitude. It is proof of my corporeal existence, my ability to control my movement through space if not time, and the obedience, however temporary, of my body to my will. As I run I displace air, and things come and go around me, and the path moves like a filmstrip beneath my feet.”

— Audrey Niffenegger

“A: So you intend to return to your desert?
B: I am not quick moving. I have to wait for myself- it is always late before the water comes to light out of the well of my self, and I often have to endure thirst for longer than I have patience. That is why I go into solitude- so as not to drink out of everybody's cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself and rob me of my soul- and I grow angry with everybody and fear everybody. I then require the desert, so as to grow good again.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“No man will speak to his master; but to a wanderer and a friend, to him who does not come to teach or to rule, to him who asks for nothing and accepts all things, words are spoken by the camp-fires, in the shared solitude of the sea, in riverside villages, in resting-places surrounded by forests-words are spoken that take no account of race or colour. One heart speaks-another one listens; and the earth, the sea, the sky, the passing wind and the stirring leaf, hear also the futile tale of the burden of life.”

— Joseph Conrad

“Solitude is good in the evening. Dublin is a quiet city when you get to a certain age, when your friends settle down and have kids. Nothing much happens here.”

— Colm Toibin

“Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.”

— Thomas Merton

“It is not physical solitude that actually separates one from others; not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“The aim of marriage, as I feel it, is not by means of demolition and overthrowing of all boundaries to create a hasty communion, the good marriage is rather one in which each appoints the other as guardian of his solitude and shews him this greatest trust that he has to confer. A togetherness of two human beings is an impossibility and, where it does seem to exist, a limitation, a mutual compromise which robs one side or both sides of their fullest freedom and development. But granted the consciousness that even between the closest people there persist infinite distances, a wonderful living side by side can arise for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of seeing one another in whole shape and before a great sky!”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is so much obligatory generosity to being a good mother, a good wife, a good friend. Solitude is an acceptable form of selfishness.”

— Anna Quindlen

“These cause the ideas of renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? Was he, in the midst”

— Victor Hugo

“No one can be happy in eternal solitude.”

— Anne Brontë

“Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.”

— Edward Hirsch

“Remember that although the distinction can be difficult to draw, loneliness and solitude are different.”

— Gretchen Rubin

“I have others who rob me of my solitude, and yet do not truly offer me company.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

“Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather, it means never living apart from one's self.
A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life”

— Parker J. Palmer

“I wanted to wallow in my solitude and grief”

— Ally Carter

“Solitude is precious balm to my heart in these paradistic parts.”

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“It's practically my subject, my theme: solitude and community; the weirdness and terrors of solitude: the stifling and consolations of community. Also, the consolations of solitude.”

— Derek Mahon

“Solitude is a catalyst for innovation”

— Mahatma Gandhi

“A little time separates us from those who depart - a time of tears, a time of sadness and solitude; but, that over, we go to rejoin them and to enjoy with them the society of the blessed. Oh, how sweetly the heart rests in this immortal hope!”

— Eugenie De Guerin

“The solitude of the poet is the uniqueness of his experience, and the particulaity of his sensitivity and imagination.”

— Mieczyslaw Jastrun

“Study requires solitude, and solitude is a state dangerous to those who are too much accustomed to sink into themselves”

— Samuel Johnson

“There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.”

— May Sarton

“A good conscience fears no witness, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even in solitude. If we do nothing but what is honest, let all the world know it. But if otherwise, what does it signify to have nobody else know it, so long as I know it myself? Miserable is he who slights that witness.”

— Seneca The Younger

“Those moments of solitude and exhibiting a mental breakdown, and how you do that physically and without it being too obvious, but being relatively settled but relatively intense. There are some intense moments in there that sort of pepper his breakdown.”

— Elijah Wood

“Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.”

— Emile M. Cioran

“Imperishable moments and immortal deeds, death itself and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed and the earth tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for the moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest.”

— Arthur Balfour

“It is important to have a certain amount of solitude just to clear your circuits. You will find that you can be very happy just being by yourself. Go to new places. It will cleanse your spirit.”

— Frederick Lenz

“I arise to day ... In the name of Silence / Womb of the Word, / In the name of Stillness / Home of Belonging, / In the name of the Solitude / of the Soul and the Earth”

— John O'Donohue

“Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.”

— Brenda Ueland

“Where should the scholar live? In solitude, or in society? in the green stillness of the country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, or in the dark, gray town where he can hear and feel the throbbing heart of man?”

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!”

— Herman Melville

“Solitude is unquenched ego.”

— Kedar Joshi